News Brief

12/23/2011, Kislev 27, 5772

Turkey Accuses France of Genocide in Algeria

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey accused France, Friday, of committing genocide during its colonial occupation of Algeria. He said massacres were carried out by French colonialists and that Algerians were burned in ovens.

Erdogan suspended political, military and economic contacts, and ordered the Turkish ambassador to France home for consultations, Thursday, after the lower house of the French legislature passed a bill making it a crime to deny that the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in the early 1900s constitute genocide.